Display systems typically include a display and optionally input devices. An interactive display system (“interactive system”) can include an interactive canvas onto which digital content is presented. The interactive system can also include a touchscreen as an input device configured to display the interactive canvas. Users can interact with the system using the touchscreen, e.g., to provide input. The interactive system can detect pointer interactions between the canvas and a pointing device, such as a pen tool, or a user's finger or hand. Content can be added, modified, or erased based on the pointer interactions.
In some display systems, multiple users can view and/or add digital content to an interactive canvas. In such systems, a plurality of computing devices can connect to a common host server. The host server executes a collaboration application that presents the canvas of a host computing device to each of the other users via their corresponding computing devices. The collaboration application allows the users to work together in a collaboration session. Users can make handwritten annotation with a pen tool or their hand in the form of digital ink. Digital ink is often stored on the canvas in vector form which provides scalability and allows the ink to be easily manipulated and modified (e.g., erased).
Users can sometimes share content, such as images, on the canvas. One challenge with conventional techniques for sharing images is that they are typically stored on the canvas in their native format such as a bitmap or in another non-vector format. Such formats do not enable the user to interact with the image in the same manner as digital ink. For example, bitmaps are not infinitely scalable nor they can be readily modified through erasure or other vector-based graphical operations.